What Restaurants Teach Us About Cities

An aerial hoop hung above the dining room at Berber.

The North African restaurant and supper club I co-founded in San Francisco brought food and live performance into the same room. People came for dinner; above them, an aerialist could take flight. (Eater SF)

A restaurant table ordinarily establishes a small territory: your companions, your glasses, your conversation. A performance can change that arrangement. Separate tables become an audience. Strangers have something to experience together without needing an introduction.

But spectacle is only one reason a restaurant matters. There is a quieter achievement: a place becomes somewhere people expect to return. An evening there no longer requires an occasion. Being there becomes the occasion.

That is where hospitality begins to teach us something about cities.

The right to remain a stranger

Imagine someone eating alone at a counter.

There need be nothing poignant about it. Perhaps they have finished work. Perhaps the apartment is quiet and they would prefer somewhere less quiet. Perhaps they simply want dinner cooked by somebody else.

They do not need to make a friend. They need a place.

We sometimes ask too much of the word community, as though every gathering place must turn strangers into intimates. A city also needs rooms where people can remain strangers comfortably—where they can participate in public life without performing sociability.

Good hospitality understands this. It notices without interrogating. It makes room for someone who wants conversation and someone who has had enough of it.

Much of that welcome is communicated before an order is taken. Is there somewhere to wait without feeling in the way? Can you ask what something costs without embarrassment? Does the greeting feel like an invitation or an evaluation?

These are questions about restaurants. They are also questions about building entrances, parks and streets.

Beauty matters. So do proportion, light and the comfort of a chair. But a beautiful room can still make someone feel unwelcome. The harder achievement is to create a distinctive place without making people feel they must qualify for it.

Hospitality on both sides of the table

There is a limit to this argument: a restaurant’s welcome generally comes with a bill.

A supper club is not a public library. Celebrating restaurants as gathering places should never become an excuse to make belonging available only through consumption.

Nor should we measure a room’s generosity solely from the guest’s chair.

Someone prepares the food before the first reservation. Someone washes the plates after the last guest has stopped thinking about them. Any serious account of hospitality has to follow those people beyond the dining room.

Can they get home safely when their shifts end? Can they afford to live within a reasonable journey of work? Do their schedules leave room for lives of their own?

An owner cannot solve a housing shortage. A diner cannot redesign public transportation over dinner. But those limits do not erase the decisions within our reach: how people are paid and scheduled, whose needs inform a development, what kind of work our expectations require.

A city that celebrates its restaurants should care whether the people sustaining them can also make a life there.

Making the next visit possible

Berber served its final dinner on March 2, 2024. That belongs in this essay alongside the opening. (San Francisco Chronicle)

A restaurant can matter to people and still close. Its contribution to a city and its ability to sustain itself are related, but they are not the same thing.

I would not make one business’s closing a verdict on San Francisco. What interests me is what a vacancy alone cannot describe: the work, routines and relationships that must find somewhere else to go.

A new tenant may fill the room without replacing everything that happened there.

This does not mean a city should resist change. Today’s beloved institution was once somebody’s uncertain opening. We need to care for familiar places while making it possible for unfamiliar ones to begin.

For those of us who work with buildings, that requires looking beyond the finished photograph. A floor plan can show an entrance and the distance between tables. It cannot tell us whether someone arriving for the first time will feel comfortable enough to return. The design is the beginning of that responsibility, not its completion.

Not every neighborhood needs an aerial hoop. It does need reasons for people to leave their separate rooms: sometimes for astonishment, sometimes for a familiar meal at a table where nothing remarkable needs to happen.

Both depend on people making a place for other people, then preparing to do it again tomorrow.

At the end of dinner, the guest goes home. Later, the person who served them goes home too.

A city worth caring for should make it possible for both to come back.